Juvenile Criminality – Society On The Verge

Amir Suhail Wani

Growing criminality in any context is symptomatic of an underlying unrest and unattended maladies festering beneath the surface of apparent calm. While humans have been struggling with criminality and penology for centuries, the phenomenon of juvenile delinquency is a comparatively recent and complex criminal manifestation. The valley of Kashmir, where such cases have been unheard of in the past, has also come to occupy a place on the juvenile criminality map with figures on the rise and the nature of crimes getting gruesome, the reports suggest. The recent incident of a 16 year old boy killing a man for objecting to relationship with his daughter rang some bells and the word caught fire that all is not well and our society is pregnant with criminal potential of unforeseen nature. In another criminal accident a juvenile stabbed to death a 15 year old boy in Srinagar, sending shock waves across the city. This is in addition to the several stabbing incidents that have been reported in Qamarwari, Bemina, Kralpora, Batmaloo, Nowhatta, Kothibagh, Rambagh areas of district Srinagar in the past four months. These episodes speak of a deeper malice corrupting the social substructure and points to the invisible but pressing frustrations faced by the youth on one front or the other. It also raises sharp questions on parental upbringing, the eroding social fabric, the losing grip of the social institutions and the negligence of educational institutions, be they schools or tuition institutions to their fundamental prerogative of man making instead of money minting.

A child is not an island separated from the familial and social mainland. His growth and evolution, pattern of living is by the collective impulses rising from social forces, family environment and peer group, access to education or lack thereof. In tracing the major catalysts driving the criminal behaviour among children one comes across the factors like Poverty, Drug Abuse, Anti-social Peer Group, Easy availability of firearms, Abusive parents, Single-parent child, Nuclear Family, Family Violence and Child sexual abuse. However, in recent times, exposure to media which glorifies violence and depicts criminality as a heroic deed has not only accelerated criminality among youth, but normalised the abnormal too. Social media platforms incessantly bombard us with the content celebrating and glorifying violence, which the teenagers are easily driven away by. The rise of social media and hyper-urbanization has also weakened parental control; a mechanism which in the past kept the behaviour of children under check. Ironically, the glorification of material pursuits within families and societies and the loss of socio-cultural values have also stirred in children the slumbering bestial traits, made them to model their lives on animalistic pattern where violence is the norm and strength the sole merit. Precisely, the shattering of the social matrix and forgoing the cherished values has brought with it a storm of new-age issues with juvenile criminality as part of the package. While conferring upon children the unprecedented liberty and freeing them from all controlling mechanisms under the pretence of delivering them from the clutches of parental oppression has thrown them out of gears. The disempowering of teachers to the extent where they can’t speak in a loud tone to the student has had repercussions of its kind. In an ironic inversion of hierarchy, teachers now seem to be scared of students, fearing character assassination from students over social media or other undeserved consequences of their corrective actions. In the past, children were under parental vigilance at home and under the surveillance of teachers at schools – the disappearance or in-effectuation of these means has pushed youth into criminal euphoria. We do not intend to advocate, behind the veneer of this moral nostalgia, the resurrection of corporal punishment or throttling the liberty of youth. But it must also be seen that youth are not totally left to themselves, entitled to chaos and criminality of all colours.

While the society as a whole, including our religious institutions, has a responsibility to create a bulwark against these gore and ignoble episodes, we must not fall into the trap of ethicising the problem. This requires such a refinement of understanding and an insight into the heart of the problem as is mostly absent and this absence of understanding leads to addressing it in ways which only augments the underlying malady. The aim is to create a social ambience where such cases don’t arise in the first place – the place which can be created to the best of approximation by addressing the issues enumerated above as triggers for juvenile criminality. However, once a teenager commits a crime, there are chances of the occurrence of criminal atavism and to abort these tendencies and save the youngsters from turning into lifelong criminals, institutional and structural interventions are mandatory. The state of affairs in this sphere isn’t well in our state and except the lone overloaded juvenile jail at Harwan, the state lacks infrastructural and human resources to cope up with the issue. To put a brake, if not a full-stop on this emerging and threatening phenomenon of juvenile criminality, society can’t treated in bits and pieces, assigning this role to family and that to school, but society as a whole with all its institutions has to rise up to its task of slaying the goliath.